The Hot Seat

The titans of the new ergonomy have billions of dollars riding on your butt. Bruce Sterling reports from behind the battle lines.

The New Economy is fundamentally about sitting on your ass. The Digital Revolution means sitting with a devout intensity that has never been equaled by sitters before. It means staring rigidly into a single screen and moving your fingers up and down. It means a generation, hunched forward tensely, groping for cybernetic interaction, typing and clicking. Forget those little breaks that used to come with traditional pink-collar office work, like changing a typewriter ribbon, pulling open a file cabinet, or fainting. Now everything's right in front of you, and you perch there staring and clicking for years on end.

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When it comes to workplace hazards, sitting all day is, admittedly, not to be ranked with coal mining. But sitting can genuinely hurt you, because human bodies did not evolve to live in chairs. Many great civilizations – Japan and India, for instance – never had chairs and never missed them. Chair-sitting is good for literate, focused, detail work, but too much of it is bad for your spine, your calves, your arms, your shoulders, and your neck. The human body, that pumping, oozing, breathing, cartilaginous sausage, can't abide being rigidly constrained in any "proper" position. Even sleepers flop around periodically, to get blood flowing, to relax pinched nerves. So, by definition, there can be no perfect workplace posture and no perfect chair. There are only thousands of variously imperfect postures, and various chairs that limit the destruction, more or less.

That said, today's Knowledge Worker drones (and I heartily count myself as one of the hive) have long had technology on their side. In the vanished feudal days, the core categories for office seating were clunky, chunky, leather-wrapped executive thrones and typist's task chairs, those squeaky insults to lumbar happiness. Nowadays, if you're willing to throw down the investment, you can buy a cutting-edge chair that's so ductile and cozy you'll want to slither from your seat and kiss its wheels.

But modern "ergo chairs" are more than just comfort providers: They're design fetishes, signature pieces of their age – sculpture and utility in the same cool package. Chairs are intimate, jealous possessions second only to beds. A seriously functional task chair is by no means just a gussied-up contrivance. It's a mechanical spectacle, a wondrous thing with previously unknown technological capacities, a high-end designer objet whose ancestors won't be found hanging around the kitchen table but in aircraft, sports arenas, and emergency rooms.

I've been thinking about chairs a lot lately because my butt sorely needs a new one. Old Faithful, my cyberblack-leather Bulldog chair – codesigned for Knoll by my friend Mike McCoy – is showing its age after years of hard use in the home office. You could say much the same for my middle-aged, novel-typing spine. So I found myself ready to embark on a fundamentally personal quest for the State of the Art in Sitting.

To get in the spirit of things, I visited a yupscale office boutique in my hometown of Austin, Texas, where I squeezed rump-first into an Aeron chair to remind my backside what quality feels like. The Aeron – a target of drone lust since 1994 – was a breakthrough success for Herman Miller Inc., a Zeeland, Michigan-based company that hauls in $1.8 billion a year equipping Dilberts worldwide. Designed by the veteran team of Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick, the Aeron – which costs between $750 and $1,100 – has dominated the trendier office landscapes since its rollout.

Oddly, on intimate contact, the most luxurious aspect of an Aeron is the very part that looks least plausible: the polyester-mesh seat. There's no comfy padding on the Aeron. Nothing like traditional upholstery. Just a weird plastic network, stretched drumhead-tight over a squash-racket frame of recycled aluminum. But it's a very resilient network: It treats your ass as network damage and routes around it. Aeron material is tough, unstainable, and extremely durable; you can sweat, splash, and dribble right through it. The Aeron is a true workaholic's vehicle. Panic deadlines, 80-hour weeks, food binges, spilled cola – no problem!

The Aeron is light, flexible, mobile, resourceful, and utterly resilient. Poised like a damselfly on its off-center mechanical core, it is leveraged, restless, and always ready to serve. Though the Aeron has earned its rightful place in the Museum of Modern Art, it looks happiest when it supports a living, breathing human occupant. Then its frame and mesh become a kind of halo for the sitter.

It seems almost Philistine to gripe about the Aeron, or to consider it a touch old-fashioned – it's like whining that your classic Chuck Taylor high-tops aren't made of spun titanium. But I found myself wanting something else – something freakier, more out there, more … beyond, and I was willing to get out of my chair to go find it. Why not board a jet and visit the Steelcase chair factory?

Steelcase is the $3 billion-a-year corporate home of the Leap chair, a high-cachet ergomasterpiece that premiered in 1999. It took Steelcase four years to create the Leap, which consumed $35 million in design and retooling costs and involved 11 academic studies, 23 patents, and 2 forehead-wrinkling design teams. The Leap is a massive industrial effort unparalleled in the annals of chair R&D.

The Leap's primary evangelists are Ken Tameling, the project's coordinator, and David Gresham, Steelcase's head of design. I meet them inside the Steelcase Corporate Development Center, a large, rather eerie Egyptianate pyramid in a woodsy suburb of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Gresham, 43, comes across like the canny, ring-wise design veteran, while the 39-year-old Tameling, with his taut gestures and bright blue eyes, is the team spark plug. The Leap has just won a major German furniture-design prize, so these guys have a spring in their step today. As they lead me around the plant, they speak the ineffable, high-priest language of Deep Chairness – explaining, with gusto, the Leap's Zen-like particularities and its "four major paradigm shifts." At one point Tameling declares, with a level stare: "The way chairs are designed and evaluated is going to change forever, based on what we've done here."

Is this mere bragging? I don't think so. People who sit in Leaps don't often go back to the old way. This chair is a genuine advance in industrial design; not for nothing is the Leap the most popular rollout in Steelcase history. Though the chair debuted only last June, Steelcase is already shipping 5,000 Leaps a week, priced from $700 to $1,400 each, with demand growing steadily. The company is poised to double its Leap assembly line in the US this year, and is cranking up its production capabilities in France.

Gresham and Tameling walk me through the chugging heart of the plant, where they proudly show American industrial might in action. To witness the new Leap assembly line, all suspended ceiling hooks, spark-spitting robots, and stainless steel roller tracks, is to tremble at the raw power of Steelcase. In a two-story, million-square-foot facility, hefty workin'-class Michigan dudes in toe protectors and mullet haircuts are power-drilling an endless stream of Leaps, humping to the beat of the Foo Fighters on their private boom boxes. The Leap has a shot at overtaking all other Steelcase chairs, plus the Aeron, in the battle for global chair supremacy, and for that to happen, these guys have to ship a lot of product.

"These guys know how much this means to the company, and they'd charge through drywall to get it done," Tameling says fondly.

That's nice. But when it comes to ergothrones, the customer is the only person who counts, so I jump into a Leap and start hacking it. A properly adjusted Leap chair is like a tailored suit – it's very intimately and specifically about you, including your shoulders, wrists, elbows, thighs, and, especially, your spine. Most anything that can affect the sitting human body has its own control domain in a Leap. That's part of its tech appeal: a frenetic tinkerability that could keep you as busy as a nerd partitioning his hard drive. Leaps are shipped with instructions papered over the seat, backed up by an animated Web site (www.leap-chair.com/adj-main.html) for those in need of ongoing, interactive updates. During my test sit, I discover the deep joys of messing with the instrument panel. The Leap's Seat Height is controlled by an up/down paddle on the right-hand side, under the seat. Upper Back Force involves a twistable cylinder knob. Lower Back Firmness is another twistable knob, flat rather than cylindrical this time – and this one clicks. The Back Stops are controlled by a paddle that pivots around the Upper Back control knob, and it has five distinct settings.

There's no comfy padding on the Aeron. Just polyester mesh that treats your rump as network damage and routes around it.

We're halfway home now, so bear with me. The Seat Depth paddle is a D-shaped thing on the left side, rear. When I lift and hold it up, I can move the seat pan backward and forward, which would be quite a handy thing to do if my thighs were at all out of the ordinary. There's also the Seat Edge Angle paddle, which causes the seat pan to bend gracefully down in front.

Then comes the marvelous complex of adjustments that govern Arm Height, Width, and Pivot. I squeeze a pair of small underbuttons, and the two independent armrests separately pull up, push down, and telescope in and out to suit my elbow width. With impressive, fluid ease, they pivot in place to form nifty forearm typing supports. These Leap armrests – the brainchildren of Steelcase engineers Michel Lamart and Kurt Heidmann – are small furnishings in themselves. Their multiplex mechanical capacities are downright amazing, more like Rubik's Cubes than conventional armrests.

It's just a tad obsessive, actually. You can easily imagine pawing over those Leap mobile arms like worry beads while watching some scary market correction.

Finally comes the Leap's eighth control feature, the Lumbar Height Sliders. These pads adjust a delicate little stiffener that slithers up and down through the Leap's most striking feature: its "Live Back" – which looks like a horseshoe crab and behaves like a plastic exoskeleton.

Once I've got the Leap chair booted up and initialized, I find myself in a new postindustrial realm of radically usercentric individual support. It's as if I'd suddenly grown an adjustable carapace. Not quite human, maybe, but inhumanly faithful and highly attentive to my needs.

To complete this baroque array of choices, the Leap comes with pillowed, standard, and vested upholstery, including one style called "mock snow jaguar." Before my wondering eyes, Ken Tameling takes positive delight in ripping the chair's upholstery free from its plastic frame. A Leap's upholstery can whip apart without damage in seconds, and it reassembles just as easily. You want an iridescent fabric finish? Plush suede? Stenciled cowhide? Why even make that harsh decision? Why not buy all three?

Crank it up, crank it down. You can make the Leap fit you – and only you – better than any chair ever has before.

With the Aeron and Leap ready to rumble, two industrial titans are going head to head in a savage battle for the hearts, minds, and behinds of corporate America. But in the New Economy, that's never the whole story – there's always a dark horse, a bold alternative, a Third Way.

Humanscale, based in New York City, is definitely different: It isn't even a furniture company. It's a modestly sized multinational with 1999 sales of $44 million whose main business is making gizmos for computer users – handy add-ons like screen-glare filters, plastic copyholders, and footrests. Now it has made a chair, which debuted this spring. Before the big rollout, I visited the birthplace of the Humanscale Freedom chair – the Ridgefield, Connecticut, home/studio of designer Niels Diffrient, who lives on a placid, 14-acre retreat that's all stony ponds and moody Robert Frost woods.

Diffrient has been in the comfort biz a long time. In 1974, he literally wrote the book on ergonomic design, releasing the first installment of a three-volume opus called, not coincidentally, Humanscale. Back in 1955, Diffrient (now a hale and hearty 71) was one of the first guys to x-ray a human spine in a chair, discovering and documenting what chairs do to people in real life. Before that, he reminisces when we meet, "We knew nothing, except what you'd see from a skeleton." Skeletons don't purchase much office seating, and a live human spine appeared on the x-ray plates as very, well, lively. "It looked like a stack of child's blocks with soft doughnuts between them," says Diffrient.

Diffrient's roots as an industrial design pro run deep. He has the full pedigree: After graduating from the Cranbrook Academy for the Arts, he went to Milan on a Fulbright scholarship to study with the famed architect Marco Zanuso. After that came 25 years designing in the legendary Henry Dreyfuss offices in New York and Los Angeles (famous for its "clean-lined" user convenience), a design professorship at UCLA, and a stint as a visiting critic at the Yale School of Architecture.

In 1981, Diffrient grew tired of designing thermostats, power pylons, highway trucks, and tractor seating for the corporate likes of John Deere, AT&T, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He wanted more creative control, so he resigned from Dreyfuss and built himself a home office. He was, he tells me, fed up with the tiresome runaround from thick layers of corporate bureaucrats: "They just don't get it."

This isn't to say that Humanscale's Freedom chair is a heroic one-man effort; ergo chairs just aren't born that way. Diffrient has a full-time assistant, James Sortor, who mans a CAD-CAM station in a loft under the studio's slanted beams. There's also Toby Wells, a CAD-CAM expert in charge of "surface development," finagling the shape of the outer contours. Tom Latone is a 3-D modeler who handles internal mechanisms and finished prototypes. Diffrient's machinist, Nigel Miller, works in a shop in Redondo Beach, California, where he translates computer specs into the graceful warps and bends of cold hard metal. And finally, says Diffrient gallantly, there's the man he considers his irreplaceable client – Robert F. King, the president of Humanscale.

Diffrient designed his chair the traditional way: by hand, with a pencil, on a big sheet of architect's paper, on a slanted drawing board. The chair's major material innovation is TechnoGel, the offspring of a German medical firm and an Italian sports company. TechnoGel is rather like silicone, except, Diffrient says solemnly, "it doesn't leach." European amputees use TechnoGel to provide comfy support at the junction of stumps and artificial limbs. The material spreads weight with uncanny gentleness, thanks to its gelatinous buoyancy. The Freedom chair's waferlike seat does the same thing, going way beyond mere "cushioning." It's like sitting in a puddle of your own flesh.

TechnoGel spreads weight with uncanny gentleness, going way beyond mere "cushioning." It's like sitting in a puddle of your own flesh.

Then there's the chair's unique back support. The Freedom doesn't rely on the resilience of Aeron's webbing or Leap's ribbed plastic: It's mechanical. Users' backs are supported with their own weight, shifted up and around with the chair's patented leverage system. Cunningly designed sliding tracks keep the support pressure constant, no matter how the chair moves. It's a new mechanical invention, sheer Connecticut Yankee ingenuity. But unlike, say, a BarcaLounger or La-Z-Boy, which also unfold and extend mechanically, there are no dead spots in the Freedom's huge range of movement. Because your own weight supplies the motive force, the Freedom doesn't merely feel "live," it feels downright haunted.

On the adjustable-gizmo front, Diffrient went minimal. He's convinced of the full, sour truth about empowering people to set their own chairs with a lot of complicated knobs and paddles. Maybe that'll work – for obsessives. But normal people, he's certain, would rather cripple themselves than master that learning curve.

Thus, the Freedom chair is free of controls. There's one lever on the thing – for adjusting seat height. Beyond that, there are no knobs, locks, or buttons. The arms move up and down in tandem when you gently pluck them forward. You can set the chair's height, you can adjust the seat pan a little, and you can toggle the backrest so the curve hits the small of your back, where it belongs. That's it. You shouldn't have to think about the chair again, or touch a knob.

Humanscale also offers the Saddle, a cute optional stool for the Freedom chair. It's not a major selling point, but Diffrient insisted on designing it. For decades, he has observed office workers propping their weary feet up. On desks. On tabletops. On file cabinets. On cardboard boxes. On anything in reach. So he came up with the Freedom chair accessory. When you're not using it, someone else can perch on it.

Unlike the Leap and the Aeron, the Freedom will tilt back – way back. You can lean back smoothly, as far as in a barber's chair, and, cunningly propelled by a long steel push-rod, a curved, upholstered Freedom headrest sways up like a cobra's hood to grasp your grateful nape. With a Freedom, you don't merely have a second spine – you have a second neck.

Diffrient's chair is a slightly strange fruit of his genius that, if properly understood, exploited, and purchased in bulk, would save a great many people from a great deal of unnecessary, life-degrading pain. Design has no higher aim. Plus, let's be honest: The Freedom chair looks amazingly cool!

So my personal quest ends in an arty loft in Connecticut, and I suppose any marketer could have predicted that. Small-home-office consumer. College-area zip code. Arty, out-there, literary type. An iMac user, for heaven's sake. The kind of guy who prefers The Matrix to Star Wars and reads I.D. for fun. Sign Mr. Sterling up for a Freedom chair, and if it doesn't break the back of his Visa card – the no-frills price is $985 – sell him that nifty little stool, too!

But I'm under no illusion that I've permanently met my postindustrial chair needs, because the evolution of thrones won't stop now. The Aeron, Leap, and Freedom – these chairs are all mere transitionals to a more fundamental rethink of Chairness that seems inevitable as the 21st century unfolds.

You can see the first inklings in new, upstart designs like the Microsphere, a skeletal chair/stool/computer workstation unveiled last fall that promises to place the sitter at the center of a revolutionary new "ergonomic microenvironment." What the Microsphere people are really talking about is merging you with your machine, but this system isn't the final word: To my eye, it looks like something you'd use to make androids confess religious heresies, and I'm already looking past it to what might be.

Because if you think about it, we're on the cusp of something great: If a chair is redefined as a computer peripheral, then the logical next step is to jack the chair directly into the computer. Imagine an ergo chair that really does boot up, that's smart enough to adjust itself to your moment-to-moment needs. It's another world, and it's only a hop and a skip away. Forget power behind the throne; we want power inside the throne. Then we'll be living in a world of alert furniture, where the Aeron, Leap, and Freedom chairs become dated relics of handicraft, like the lariats used in the Old West.

Until then, we must wait. Oh, and sit. And while we do, we should count our blessings. Comfort isn't everything, but it's something, and we've got it. While we await the arrival of the electronic sitting frontier, we're in the golden age of the massively sedentary console cowboy. Saddle up, compadre.

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